Saturday, March 31, 2007

Castro Still Alive and Misguided

It helps to be fabulously rich if you want to cheat death for a few thousand days. Fidel Castro is back in public view and he is outraged! He accuses the Bush Administration of using food as an imperial weapon against the hungry masses of the poor.

Fidel bashes bio-fuels: Cuban leader Fidel Castro, in his first editorial since largely disappearing from public view due to illness last year, charged US demand for biofuels directly hurts the world's poor. … "The sinister idea of converting food into combustibles was definitively established as the economic line of foreign policy of the United States," he wrote. The remarks came in response President Bush's meeting this week with the heads of the big three automakers in Washington.

Hunger: Where Is The Scorn? There's never a shortage of dictators to hurl abuse at the U.S. for its food policies. But they have no right to do it. Marxism, not freedom, is the world's foremost creator of hunger. … Cuba's communist dictator Fidel Castro on Thursday denounced the U.S.' production of grain ethanol as 'sinister' and a coming cause of ecological catastrophe and global starvation.

By the way, all three Marxist states claim food is a right for all. But the hunger their people suffer is in fact just another monstrous instance of state failure. In all three, private property is outlawed and expropriated. … Where is the U.N. report denouncing North Korea, Zimbabwe or Cuba for policies that create mass starvation, all because they refuse to permit any free-market activity even if it means saving their citizens' lives?

The sad part is that Castro is actually correct that the ideology driven environmentalist push to return human society to biofuels is in all probability going to be harmful to nature. Using surface organic material to replace subsurface inorganic energy sources is absolutely not going to be good for all the wee creatures. The answer to hunger is the overthrow of dictatorship followed by the restoration of property rights and uncorrupted commerce.